Derailed

FIVE

She wasn’t.

He took the same train, stood on the very same spot on the platform.

He walked the train from car to car — first back, then forward — scanning each face the way people do in airports when they’re expecting relatives from overseas. Faces they know but don’t know, but long to know now.

“Remember the woman who bailed me out yesterday?” he asked the conductor. “Have you seen her?”

“What are you talking about?” The conductor didn’t remember him, didn’t remember her, didn’t remember the incident. Maybe he was used to berating commuters on a regular basis; yesterday’s drama wasn’t worthy of recall.

“Never mind,” Charles said.

She wasn’t there.

He was a little amazed that it mattered to him. That it mattered to the point where he’d walked the cars like a rousted homeless man seeking warmth. Who was she, anyway, but a married woman he’d harmlessly flirted with on the way to work? And that’s what made it harmless — that they hadn’t done it again. So why exactly was he looking for her?

Well, because he wanted to talk, maybe. About this and that and the other thing. About what happened to him at the office yesterday, for instance.

He hadn’t been able to tell Deanna.

He was all ready to. Honest.

“How was work today?” she’d asked him at dinner.

A perfectly legitimate question, the question, in fact, he’d been waiting for. Only Deanna had looked tired and worried — she’d been peering into Anna’s blood sugar journal when he walked into the kitchen.

So Charles had said: “Work’s fine.”

And that was it for talk about the office.

When Anna first got sick, they’d talked of nothing else. Until it became apparent what the future held for her, and then they’d stopped talking about it. Because to talk about it was to acknowledge it.

Then they created a whole canon of things they were not to talk to each other about. Anna’s future career plans, for example. Any article in Diabetes Today involving loss of limbs. Any bad news in general. Because complaining about something other than Anna diminished Anna.

“I was monitored by Mrs. Jeffries today,” Deanna said. Mrs. Jeffries was her school principal.

“How did it go?”

“Fine. Pretty much. You know she always throws a fit if I deviate from accepted lesson plans.”

“So did you?”

“Yes. But the composition I gave out was ‘Why we like our principal.’ So she couldn’t really complain, could she?”

Charles laughed. And thought how that was something they used to do a lot of. The laughing Schines. And he looked at his wife and thought, Yes, she’s still beautiful.

Dirty blond hair — with a little help from Clairol, maybe — tousled and curly and barely constrained by a white elastic headband; dark brown eyes that never looked at him without at least a modicum of love. Only there were tired lines radiating out from the corners of those eyes, as if tears had cut actual tracks into the surface of her skin. Like those lines crisscrossing NASA photographs of Mars — dry riverbeds, the astronomers explain, where torrents of water once surged across the now dead landscape. Which is sometimes the way he thought about Deanna — all cried out.

After dinner they both went upstairs. Charles attempted to help Anna with her eighth-grade social homework—the separation of church and state, something she was trying to do with MTV tuned to the volume of excruciating.

“What steps did the United States take to separate church and state?” Charles said, only he mouthed the words so that maybe Anna would get the point — that there should be a separation of homework and TV.

She refused to take the hint. When he finally stood in front of the television so she’d stop sneaking peeks at Britney or Mandy or Christina and concentrate on the business at hand, she told him to move.

“Sure,” he said. And jerked his arms and legs in a reasonable facsimile of the funky chicken. See, I’m moving.

At least that elicited a smile, no small accomplishment from a thirteen-year-old daughter whose general demeanor ranged from sullen to dour. Then again, she had good cause.

When he finished helping her, he gave her a kiss on the top of her head and she grunted something that sounded like Good night or Get lost.

Then he entered his bedroom, where Deanna was lying under the covers and pretending to sleep.

The next morning he ran into Eliot by the elevators.

“Can I ask you something?” Charles said.

“Sure.”

“Did you know they were coming in to ask me off the business?”

“I thought they came in to complain about the advertising. Asking you off the business was how they registered the seriousness of their complaint.”

“I just wondered if you knew it was coming.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why do you want to know if I knew it was coming? What’s the difference, Charles? It was coming.”

When the elevator doors opened, Mo was standing there with two legal pads and the new head creative on the business.

“Going down?” she said.